openSUSE updateinfo.xml and repomd extensions

Hi guys,

In openSUSE we have added support for updateinfo.xml files which we want 
to use to replace our old complex patch.xml files.

As this a big step on making yum able to read our repos and libzypp able 
to read other distros repos, I would like to mention the features we 
will add to the spec, in case anyone is interested in adding them to 
yum. I had a talk on irc yesterday with Seth Vidal and James Antill and 
I got interesting feedback.

One of the changes we introduced in our updateinfo.xml generator is the 
restart_suggested flag ( in addition to reboot_suggested flag ), which 
is used to restart the update stack after it has updated itself before 
continuing with more.

As our old patch.xml format had delta-rpm information, but this was 
wrong as deltarpm information is used at commit time, and not tied to 
patches but it can be used to install any package, we want to add a file 
describing delta-packages in the repository. Our idea is to add the 
following:

<data type="deltainfo">
    <location href="repodata/deltainfo.xml.gz"/>
    <checksum type="sha">5c4ca5b38c9d164263325e0414aa3442f935293a</checksum>
    <timestamp>1207662520</timestamp>
    <open-checksum 
type="sha">8c146b5e6d1d72d3937261bf8500e1486b83bacb</open-checksum>
  </data>

Linking to:

<packagedeltas>
  <deltarpm>
    <name>libzypp-zmd-backend</name>
    <arch>i586</arch>
    <version epoch="0" ver="7.1.1.0" rel="42.63"/>
    <location 
href="rpm/i586/libzypp-zmd-backend-7.1.1.0-42.45_42.63.i586.delta.rpm"/>
    <checksum type="sha">d95e4f9451bbb3f5133c1e9c38eb61353de84841</checksum>
    <time file="1178625607" build="1178556880"/>
    <size package="22548" archive="0"/>
    <base-version epoch="0" ver="7.1.1.0" rel="42.45" 
md5sum="53e45da318fe5c633cc4b96f24b0d828" buildtime="1152145013" 
sequence_info="libzypp-zmd-backend-7.1.1.0-42.45-f1bf3671e7b76e20078df559d2bbd341d2"/>
  </deltarpm>
</packagedeltas>


That is for now all the changes we are adding. May be we need to add 
some additional attributes to updateinfo.xml, but we are still 
discussing if they are necessary.

The changes I discussed with Seth and others yesterday about supporting 
various updateinfo.xml files through a second index was discarded, as we 
realized it would not benefit us.

cheers
Duncan Mac-Vicar